Cloak of Silence is a Chronology of the Progress of Women in Britain, from 1066 to 1928, considering the duties of her gender, the codes of her conduct, the expectations of her morality, the protection of her body, the ownership of her property, the education of her mind, the writings of her pen, the rewards of her labour, the rights of her citizenship, the making of her laws, and, from 1819, the organisation of her protest.

This is a reference work, broad in scope, moderate in language, a resource to keep and treasure. It is a beautiful book, illustrated with contemporary portraits, tabloid newspapers, and satirical prints, pretty-on-the-page. It presents a radical thesis, suggesting that much of what we think we know about gender and morality in the nineteenth-century is fake news.

Britain was first to abolish slavery, but a distant second behind France (Sex) and America (Divorce and Suffrage) in granting rights and freedoms to women. Why did liberal Britain take so long? What went wrong?

Change required legislation, which was a Catch 22 problem: no votes meant no representation. The Reform Bill of 1867 failed to include votes for women, and from 1869 they started to fight for their rights. It didn’t help that they were forced to attack on separate fronts: a war of drawing-rooms in favour of votes; a war of pamphlets and petitions against discrimination of vice.

The suffrage campaign was unsuccessful, disappearing into a mess of politics until 1918. The Repeal of discrimination in 1886 is recorded as a ‘victory’, ignoring that oppressive new laws on vice were passed in 1885. If history is written by the winners, when is the losers’ turn?

Ray Strachey celebrated the triumph of equal suffrage in The Cause (1928), but she couldn’t explain why this had taken sixty-one years of struggle. The sexual revolution of the 1960’s promoted women’s liberation to the front page, championing equal rights, but still couldn’t penetrate the cloak of silence around discrimination. Really, the time for history is when the archives reveal the truth, a process of digitisation and discovery. That time has now come.

Cloak of Silence is a revisionist history of Feminism under Queen Victoria, revealing the frustrated efforts of women, their heroes, and their villains.